Year: 2014
Type: review
Abstract: The ability to concentrate on relevant sounds in the acoustic environment is crucial for everyday function and communication. Converging lines of evidence suggests that transient functional changes in auditory-cortex neurons, "short-term plasticity", might explain this fundamental function. Under conditions of strongly focused attention, enhanced processing of attended sounds can take place at very early latencies (~50 ms from sound onset) in primary auditory cortex and possibly even at earlier latencies in subcortical structures. More robust selective-attention short-term plasticity is manifested as modulation of responses peaking at ~100 ms from sound onset in functionally specialized nonprimary auditory-cortical areas by way of stimulus-specific reshaping of neuronal receptive fields that supports filtering of selectively attended sound features from task-irrelevant ones. Such effects have been shown to take effect in ~seconds following shifting of attentional focus. There are findings suggesting that the reshaping of neuronal receptive fields is even stronger at longer auditory-cortex response latencies (~300 ms from sound onset). These longer-latency short-term plasticity effects seem to build up more gradually, within tens of seconds after shifting the focus of attention. Importantly, some of the auditory-cortical short-term plasticity effects observed during selective attention predict enhancements in behaviorally measured sound discrimination performance.
Source: Neural Plasticity
DOI: 10.1155/2014/216731
Authors: Iiro P. Jääskeläinen, Jyrki Ahveninen
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,830
Funders: Academy of Finland, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Center for Research Resources, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Awards: Catagorizing Parallel Human Auditory Pathways by Spatiotemporally Focused TMS, Tools for Large-Scale Platform-Independent MEG Data Analysis, Spatiotemporal Brain Imaging of Human Auditory Cognition, Center for Functional Imaging Technologies, Dynamic imaging of oscillatory brain networks controlling selective attention, Spatiotemporal Imaging of Human Visual System Processing
OpenAlex ID: W2114791803